By Paul West

Director: Career Advice Services

Ladies and gentlemen, thank you for inviting me to speak about the plans and actions taken to establish a national career advice helpline. I met some of you a few months ago in Tokoza, just after I had started with SAQA. It’s good to be back with you and to be able to provide an update.

When I joined SAQA, I was tasked with establishing a national helpline for South Africa and am working now to set up the systems to accomplish this. In taking up this challenge, I found in the plan that this needed to be a national resource that would be comprehensive, inclusive, multi-channel and it must reach the hard-to-reach. The new service must provide affordable access wherever people live.

The Helpline will need to have a knowledge base, a database of cases handled and a self-help website that must integrate with available public and Government databases. 

The number of people we need to reach is large. We may be looking at trying to reach 10 million people over the years – and trying to do this as quickly as possible.

So, let’s look at who we are trying to reach. The slide shows that South Africans have an average life expectancy of about 53 years. This implies a relatively young population. It also shows that the GPD per person is about the same as countries like Brazil, Dominica and Grenada. The GDP is higher than India and China, and lower than Mexico and Russia. Another statistic tells us that 50% of our population is under the age of 35.

While it is easy to provide services to people in the cities, we need to provide services to people in deep rural areas as well. Fortunately, we have some well-distributed technologies like cellphones. We are said to have over 98% access to telephones thanks to the penetration of cellphones.

We cannot leave out the lesser-populated parts of the country. This slide shows the high density of population in the city areas and the very sparse population of the rural areas. We need to find ways to reach the rural areas so that the whole population has access to Career Advice services. With over 43 million cell phones in the country, this does help to increase the possibility of reaching more people through technology.

You may have seen this article a few months ago. It described the youth as being a ticking time-bomb and that only 28% of this group has a matric, that 3 million people are out of work and only 1.8 million are in work. It also says that 600,000 additional learners should be absorbed into the FET colleges.

The only way we can begin to reach the objectives we have, is to work through the multiple channels that were envisaged in the planning phase of this project. We have a Helpline or contact centre, we have one walk-in centre and have plans to expand this with the help of partners. We need a social marketing campaign that will be a mass education campaign. We have started a website and a Facebook page. We will also be working to provide databases of learning opportunities and occupational opportunities. It needs to be multi-channel, in 11 languages and we need to maintain all the sensitivities that are important to us all.

A telephone Helpline is at the heart of the service. We already have an 0860 share-call number and we are always willing to phone people back – we carry the cost of the calls. Our 0800 number will be available soon. The numbers of calls we can cope with is directly dependent on the number of people we can recruit into our Helpline, but even with massive increases in staff numbers, we will always have some limitation to how many phone calls we can take at any time.

To provide a good service to South Africa, we need people on our Helpline who are empathetic, patient and who can provide accurate information. To do this, I know we need to create an environment that is supportive, enabling and empowering. We need technological systems that make knowledge immediately available, provide real-time information and feedback, and the knowledge base that supports Helpline staff must be easy to use and update.

We are using a Media wiki system as an internal knowledge base. This is the same technology used by Wikipedia, one of the world’s busiest websites and also the location of the world’s largest and most accurate encyclopaedia. The site is constantly updated by Helpline staff, each of whom have instant access to all the knowledge contributed by their colleagues.

A star of the show at the moment are the aggregated search facilities provided by Google. These are free and can be focussed to searching particular websites of our choosing. This is an example of one we set up to search the SETAs and quality councils.

We needed a way to provide constantly updated news feeds and so have turned to “RSS” technology. By tweaking a set of rules in a system, this system provides an up-to-date news page to our Career Advice website.

SAQA has a database called the National Learners Records Database and this is at the disposal of Helpline staff who know how to search it. We have started a project to create a South African equivalent of a “Learning Directory”, an idea that is working well in the UK. Once developed, this will enable South Africans to search for courses and programmes within a specified distance of their home. It will use street addresses, postal codes and GPS coordinates. It will connect learners with service providers that are in walking or driving range.

Having a range of technologies to help people is, of course, not enough. We need walk-in centres as well. Since SAQA is in Pretoria, we have one such walk-in centre in Pretoria. Fortunately, a partner organisation is the National Youth Development Agency and they have 16 walk-in centres around the country, each of which have a career advisor on staff. This helps to expand our national network to 17 walk-in centres. The NYDA also has 171 points of contact that can help learners to make contact with our national Helpline.

We would like to work with all the CEIA partners to continue to broaden out the available access to career advice. If you have a Helpline or call centre and believe you could help to support the national effort, please make contact with me. 

Not everyone can be reached by telephone or walk-in centres, so we are starting a national radio programme next month. This will be an educational campaign that will run in 11 languages, for 48 weeks and reach about 2.3 million people per week. These programmes will carry information about important topics such as learnerships, job hunting and self-employment.

The website has been running for just a few months and has grown to include links to information on career advice throughout South Africa. We plan to include interactive tools such as the Learning directory and a CV builder tool in due course.

The website grew from a mind-map, but now includes many links to information on Career Advice websites country-wide. Rather than try to create things from scratch, we are linking into websites such as Pace and Vuma that have already done a lot of the work. We know we can get ideas from websites in the UK and NZ, but you can rest assured that we are creating a site for South Africa and not another country. In looking at features to add to the website, I noticed there are a number of online job search sites so this is something we do not need to create. We are linking to those that already exist.

One example of an online service is the job search sites. When I looked for them, I found a number of job search sites and so decided this could be a good example of a service that we did not need to create – we can leave this task to the business sector that is already running the websites. We will just link people to these sites.

Reaching as many people through as many channels will help us to reach more people in South Africa. Social networking sites will add more ways for us to reach people we may not reach through the telephone. Using sites like Facebook is not new to career guidance. Here is an example of a site aimed at helping Spanish speaking people in the US. This is another career advice site and here is a site created by Microsoft, specifically to support career development. If you are starting to think this is only for North America, here is a Facebook site for Tokoza near Johannesburg!

Facebook is growing rapidly in South Africa. There are close to 3 million registered Facebook users in the country now - and the breakdown between men and women? - more women use Facebook than men, and the greatest number of people who use Facebook are between the ages of 18 and 35. As you can imagine, the NQF and Career Advice Helpline now has a Facebook page and I encourage you to link up to the page, ask questions there and offer your own advice to people. We will monitor the page, watching to check all the answers provided by the public to other members of the public.

To reach more people, we need to work with more partners. Colleges and universities that are spread across the country, are important partners to us. We need to collaborate with you. We will also collaborate with NGOs, companies engaged in Career Advice, Universities, Community Centres Government Departments and others.

You may have noticed that we also started a Twitter site. This is to help advertise the availability of bursaries, learnerships and internships. If you have any announcements that need to reach lifelong learners around the country, please send these to me and I will post them on the Twitter page.

I would like to encourage you to participate in the volunteer spirit on the Internet. Become a member of Facebook, follow the Twitter channel and become part of the movement to crowd-source and build up the Career Advice movement. The more people who participate, the more of a difference we can make.

As I have already indicated, we will work with partners throughout the country. One way we are reaching people is via career exhibitions and festivals. How many people could we reach this way? 10,000? Maybe more? We will also be looking to collaborate with high schools throughout the country. Much is already being done with high schools and we need to ensure that the support and services reaches those high schools that have not yet been reached.

A question for us is how do we do it? A small team at SAQA cannot do it on its own. This will take every partner and individual who is willing to participate. We will work with technologies, but we need to ensure that we have people who can be the interface between the technology to which some people do not have access. We are making this ‘people enabled technology’.

To best support the Helpline staff and partners who help us, we will need a solid technological system; one that remains working! We are upgrading the telephone system with a contact centre system that will provide live communication to Helpline staff and we are creating an office environment that is as comfortable as we can make it.

I realise that nothing happens without a team and it will take a large team to make this one happen. This one happens with your support!

You can see in this diagram how there is a policy environment being established to support Career Advice. We are still establishing the management team to run the service in the future and the staff compliment, while started needs to grow to about 50 people.

To achieve a vision, there are many tasks we need to carry out. The stone mason seen here chips away at one stone, which is an essential task in his work. We need to work at answering queries and to respond to the individual needs to people who telephone or email us. But while we are working away at the essential tasks we are chipping away at, we need to remember the bigger picture of what we are trying to achieve. We need to remember the bigger picture. How else will we reach 10 million people in the country?

We can reach millions of people – some by telephone, some by radio, some via the Internet. This is the multichannel approach that was envisaged years ago when this project was conceptualised. In creating this service, let’s make it one part of making education exciting – like the little girl in this picture – let’s make education and the world of work something exciting in which everyone can participate.

Thank you for giving me this opportunity to present to you today.

Paul G. West

21 October 2010